"Pastoring In Pain": Sermon for 19 Pentecost

Job sounds confident of being able to convince God that he's a good man who doesn't deserve to suffer. And yet if we know the end of Job's story, we know God's answer: I'm God, and you're not. Does our faith at least help us grapple with suffering? Amid whatever distracts and burdens us, even alienation, persecution, and illness, do we hear an invitation from God? Can our experience of pain make us better pastors, evangelists, and servants? My Sunday sermon is here.

"Come Home, America" Watch, Day 24

From one of Andrew Sullivan's correspondents, writing about Obama administration war councils that the writer thinks don't include enough insights from Gen. McChrystal and others with direct experience with conditions on the ground in Afghanistan:

I just have an uneasy feeling that this is too similar to the policy discussions Johnson went through, except those were mainly out of public view and these are not. The whole notion that we can speed up the training of the Afghan armed forces and this will do the job is unrealistic—another numbers game. I guess not being in the meetings puncturing balloons is what is really frustrating me. That and the fact that nobody seems to factor in our moral obligation to the Afghan people. We abandoned them twice. Will this be the third time? What does that say about us? It seems more convenient to equate [President] Karzai with the Afghan people. Maybe it will all come out for the best—but the process, and what I see from the outside being discussed so far, doesn’t pass my gut check.

The outcome of the Afghan struggle is ultimately going to be determined not by our unilateral actions or geopolitical moves, but by whom the Afghan people wind up supporting, even reluctantly. Vietnam—Lesson One.

I'm having difficulty discovering my sense of our moral obligation to the Afghan people above and beyond the obligation all wealthy, powerful peoples have toward those who aren't. We're at war because Afghanistan's Taliban government nurtured and empowered a terrorist movement that mounted a devastating attack against the United States. President Bush's 2001 intervention was for our sake, not Afghanistan's. If we had focused more single-mindedly on the Taliban rather than going to war in Iraq as well, the situation might be better today, or perhaps not. Afghans are famously resistant to foreign influence and manipulation. As President Bush once understood, nation- and democracy-building should not be the goal of U.S. military and foreign policy. As far as I'm concerned, Obama should have just one question for his panel of experts, whoever they are: "What's the best way to decrease the chances that another terrorist movement or attack against us or our interests emanates from Afghanistan?"

Material Life, Inhabited By God

In a speech on Tuesday about the environmental crisis, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says people should act locally, globally, and biblically:

The Christian story lays out a model of reconnection with an alienated world: it tells us of a material human life inhabited by God and raised transfigured from death; of a sharing of material food which makes us sharers in eternal life; of a community whose life together seeks to express within creation the care of the creator. In the words used by both Moses and St Paul, this is not a message remote from us in heaven or buried under the earth: it is near, on our lips and hearts (Rom.10.6-9, Deut.30.11-14). And, as Moses immediately goes on to say in the Old Testament passage, 'You know it and can quote it, so now obey it. Today I am giving you a choice between good and evil, between life and death...Choose life' (Deut.30.14-15, 19).

How To Save The World

From the Toronto Star, how the story of a little girl living in central China helped two former Beijing correspondents for the New York Times discover the story of the century:

[Nicholas] Kristof and [Sheryl] WuDunn relate this story in their inspiring new book, Half the Sky, in which they argue that education and ending oppression of women and girls is the cornerstone to economic progress in the developing world. They call it the cause of the century, just as the anti-slavery movement was the paramount moral challenge of the 19th century....

Kristof and WuDunn also observe, tantalizingly, that in countries where terrorism is nourished, women play a negligible role in the country's economy. In Yemen, for example, women make up only 6 per cent of the non-agricultural labour force. That raises the possibility of creating a safer world if women in such places were better educated and had more influence outside the home.

About One FBI Official, Ruckelshaus Felt Different

In a fascinating Oct. 3 speech about Watergate's Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973, when he resigned his Justice Department post after refusing to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, William Ruckelshaus also describes his brief tenure as FBI acting director. He said he came away with renewed respect for the dedicated professionals of that agency -- all but ambitious W. Mark Felt, who wanted Mr. Nixon to give him the director job and later became famous as one of Woodward and Bernstein's sources of confidential government data:

I can hardly forget my first morning as FBI Director, on the Monday following my meeting with the President. On my desk upon arrival was a letter to the President from the Deputy FBI Director and the Associate Directors protesting my appointment. The Deputy Director assured me nothing personal was intended, they just felt it was inappropriate to have a bird watcher as Hoover’s successor. The Deputy Director, Mark Felt, of ‘deep throat’ fame, who was actively lobbying for the job as Director subsequently resigned when confronted by me for leaking classified information to the N. Y. Times – an unforgivable sin for an FBI agent.

"Bird watcher" is an allusion to Ruckelshaus's prior service as founding director of the EPA, part of the broader policy legacy of the Nixon administration that he believes was tainted as the result of Mr. Nixon's handling of Watergate.

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

A Call To Dissrespect Christians

Atheists such as Richard Dawkins are renowned for debating straw-man Christians who believe in a 6,000-year-old earth where Adam and Eve once roamed Eden with pet brontosauruses named Bert and Ernie. A whole bunch of us Christians actually got over that in the 18th and 19th centuries and are able to reconcile science and reason with our belief in the God who made, sustains, and redeems us.

In comparison to the doltish fundamentalists who plague them so relentlessly, atheists such as Landon Ross brag about their own brain pans:

[A]llow me to make some blunt observations that might not be politically correct, but are nevertheless obvious:

-Non-believers tend to be well-educated, scientifically minded, and smarter than average: 93% of the National Academy of Sciences do not believe in a personal God, yet roughly 80-90% of the general public do.

-In countries where there is a high standard of living and education...roughly 80% of the population are non-believers (Sweden, Norway, Denmark etc.).

Ross thinks zealots are responsible for the decline in the study of math and science in the U.S. and wants to hire teams of lobbyists to get religion out of policy and politics. He also evidently wants to confront your local youth group:

It has become trendy to be completely irrational, and 'cool' for teens to be "down with Jesus;" therefore, secularists should do everything in our power to make it un-cool. We must get past this ill-advised notion that we should "respect" other peoples beliefs.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/landon-ross/the-god-crisis_b_316606.html

Odd that a smart guy like Ross overlooks a whole category of well-educated, progressive, politically influential Christians who would probably agree with 99% of his scientific perspective (except the part that insists that the whole mighty engine of all that is creative and magnificent and beautiful started up all by itself one fine day -- and also that human beings are doing a fine job as peaceful, loving stewards of creation all by themselves).

If atheists are concerned about achieving policy outcomes in education and scientific research, they might consider making common cause with mainline Protestants and even U.S. Roman Catholics. But if it's all about affirming and validating that their own theological faith in faithlessness, they should continue as as they are. Either way, God delights in them.

"Come Home, America" Watch, Day 23

Obama administration officials say al-Qaeda, the greatest direct threat to U.S. interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is going broke.

Tall Order For Nobel Peace Prize Winner

In the "New Republic," Jeffrey Herf argues that economic sanctions won't work against Iran. Instead, only

a credible threat of military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities by the United States, perhaps joined by Britain and France, or Israel. If the Iranian leadership believed that such an attack was a real possibility, it, or some parts of it, might be persuaded to change course.

MacChrystal?

David Greenberg on those who compare Gen. McChrystal's public dialogue with President Obama to Douglas MacArthur's confrontation with Harry Truman:

Like most historical analogies bandied about in the media, this one is overdrawn. As serious as it is, the war in Afghanistan hardly approaches the Korean War in its magnitude or impact. McChrystal, for his part, has nothing like MacArthur's prestige, and his testing of Obama's supremacy falls well short of MacArthur's defiance. Yet the story of Truman and MacArthur remains useful to remember—not because it directly mirrors today's but because it created a dynamic in which subsequent presidents felt unduly constrained by the prospect of military commanders undermining them.

Majority's Rules

Dennis Prager on the Nobel Peace Prize:

The Oslo committee's view is, tragically, true. Thanks to Barack Obama, America is for the first time is aligning its values with those of "the majority of the world's population." If you think the world's population has had better values than America, that it has made societies that are more open, free, and tolerant than American society, and that it has fought for others' liberty more than America has, you should be delighted.